“Welcome to Europe”

Posted by clandestina on 16 August 2010

Announcement by the Forum of Immigrants in Crete (FMC)

August 15, 2010

This is the name of the organization which discovered and exposed the field with the mass graves of drowned refugees on the border of Evros. There’s no meaning in numbers and statistics, any more. Important are the coherences and thoughts that the images bring to those who are yet not dehumanized. The image of a shoddy metal sign, riddled by gun-shots in front of a field with fresh popped pits. “Cemetery,” is indicated, “of illegal immigrants” …

We know, of course, that a daily war is going on across the border of Evros, and its victims [we talk about dead people] are always the refugees. But it’s even shocking to know that the dead refugees are dumped into pits in the fields. Contextually are coming to mind images in black and white of war and mass killings, pictures of holocaust, with bulldozers piled up in ditches piles of corpses. Is this an exaggeration? But yet … The proportions that make the association inevitable is tolerance, indifference and complicity of those societies which are responsible for massacre.

Exaggeration? What the hell… Let’s we all learn to listen and then everyone should take responsibility for the tolerance, the indifference, and the complicity. Each year hundreds or thousands of people are killed around the -so called “civilized” western world- Europe ‘s external and internal (sea ports, detention camps) borders. The mass slaughter is taking place at our next door, as corpses are washed up on beaches where the western tourists are having their holiday, on beaches where the greek fishermen are fishing. Tragically, this mass slaughter on the borders is only the last act of the drama for the refugees who escaped from countries that have been devastated by western colonization, the IMF, dictatorships and tyrannies – servile to western interests. From countries which lack rudimentary infrastructure for the reasons above, and on the first heavy rainstorm or on a usual earthquake are measuring carnage victims. From the countries ravaged by wars for oil, diamonds, by wars of the western capital, by wars with the participation of the greek state for the sake of the greek capital.

After all these, at least let us demand from this state to bury the people who were killed in its frond door – bury them like humans and not like dogs. As a society we also have to demand stopping the institutional reproduction of this humiliating designation “illegal” for those people who were lucky enough to survive and cross that door.